Resumen
In the border region of Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia, cross-border cooperation in the fields of transport infrastructure and services is becoming important along with the series of events since the fall of the Iron Curtain: Austria?s accession to the EU in 1995, the EU Enlargement in 2004, and the Schengen treaty to eliminate border controls, which went into effect in 2007 in the Eastern European countries, all served as drivers for new cross-border travel demands within the region. It is empirically known that the distribution of planning competences to various organizations is different from one country to another; however, besides descriptive methods and classical organigrams, there has not been a practical way to compare the differences diagrammatically. This paper presents the first attempt to develop a methodology to overcome this, and its first application to compare Austrian and Slovakian competence distributions for the construction of transport infrastructure and provision of transport services. Through a trial and error process, we found that a two-step methodology is the most practical. The first step is to make diagrammatic descriptions of planning processes, and the second step is to convert many of them into one competence map. This is because we found that most of the primary information we were able to obtain from various stakeholders is based on the actual planning process of ongoing or completed real-world projects, and an overview of competences itself is hardly obtainable. The diagrammatic description of the first step is made based on a methodology of business modeling called Swimlane Process Chart, and the second step inherits a methodology for organizational modeling with Unified Modeling Language (UML). This method was applied to the case between Austria and Slovakia. Both of the countries have different traditions of planning processes and distributions of competences. In this paper, the result from our diagrammatic comparison will be presented. There are still several important rooms to develop this methodology within this first attempt: for example, a methodology to obtain information about how long each step of the process will take and which step is controlling the procedure of the entire process in a systematic way will enrich the Swimlane Process Chart.